Kevin Jonas and other celebrities converged at Willow Springs Raceway recently for a practice session for the annual Toyota Pro/Celebrity Race of Long Beach. At the end of day two of the four-day practice session for the April 16 race, the celebrities weren’t ready to race one another on the Streets of Willow track, but Jonas had already been bitten by the racing bug.

“It was a lot of fun, very intense,” Jonas tells Motor Trend. “I definitely started getting more used to the car. It’s a lot of fun finding certain lines you’re supposed to take, braking when you’re supposed to.

It’s been a baptism by fire for Jonas, who’s had to master driving a manual, learn racing skills, and get used to the rollcage and five-point harness-equipped supercharged Scion TC.

Stalling was par for the course on day one. “Yesterday I had trouble with it, right as we were getting started I thought I was in a good place and all of a sudden the car died right as I’m supposed to take off,” he recounts. “I’m like, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding!’ It was funny. The more that happens early on, the more you realize what you need to do.”

Although he tried his hand at driving a manual transmission in the past, Jonas was appreciative of these intense daylong practice sessions. “I’ve driven one once or twice, but really never spent enough time with it to get comfortable and this is a major crash course. It’s definitely getting thrown into the fire. It’s a great way to learn and now I feel confident with it and definitely happy. Doing this training is all about learning from your mistakes and I think that’s what’s really cool.”

At the technical Streets of Willow, they are taught by race instructor to the stars Danny McKeever. Skills include heel-toe shifting, cornering, and skidpad work, where they learn handbrake turns such as forward and reverse 180s.

“That was so much fun,” Jonas says of these new driving skills. “Coming off the straightaway and coming straight into it, it’s pretty much a 90-degree turn. It’s incredible to feel how much force there is, but at the same time how powerful the car is to keep accelerating to a point where it keeps you sustained all in one continuous line. You’ve driven for years and been driving back and forth to wherever you’re going, but this is just a different kind of driving. It’s all about finding the moment that you should turn, need to turn. It’s incredible. It’s just very, very cool.”

For Jonas, being on the racetrack also is a mental workout. “Really getting to know the road and how it responds and how far you can push it, it’s incredible.”

He also enjoys getting to know this eclectic group of celebrities who understand what it’s like to be in show business. “Hanging out with these guys is amazing. Everybody is a blast,” he says. But for the most part, talk was focused on the track and mastering the driving skills.

“It’s crazy to watch guys like Brian Austin Green and Frankie Muniz that have been doing this for a little while and see how fast they are and how incredibly they see everything way before it’s supposed to happen,” Jonas says. “On the first day, everybody was trying to help me out with the clutch and getting used to that as much as possible. The entire time you’re here, you’re pretty much just talking about the driving and the course. It’s kind of crazy because that’s all that’s on your mind. You wake up thinking about it, you go to bed thinking about it.”

Despite fishtailing once, Jonas is super-excited going into his first car race. “I definitely overdrove the first turn today at one point and went off road a little bit and tried to correct it and the dirt gave way. You keep fighting. Those moments are good because then you know where and how to correct it. It’s pretty great.”

Getting a taste of racing has made Jonas want to do it more in the future. “I think this is something I’ll be doing year to year for sure,” he says.

Daily Driver

Jonas loves driving his black 2010 Chevrolet Camaro, with the requisite racing stripes. “I adore that car. It drives great, it feels wonderful on the road to drive, it’s comfortable,” he says, giving the car an 8 rating.

What attracted him was the Camaro’s design. “It looked amazing. The color sequence was great and I’ve always loved it. The new body styles are so good-looking and so clean. The lines are very, very nice on it. It has such a good body shape,” he says. “It was something I started looking at and fell more and more into and then definitely decided to get one. They’re very, very cool.”

There’s nothing he dislikes about the Camaro, except that he is away much of the time and can’t drive it. “I’m starting to like it even more. The amount of time I’ve been able to drive it I’ve really enjoyed it. Highway driving, regular street driving has been really nice. I think prefer it on the street sometimes, just the way it grips the ground.”

But Jonas is no stranger to cool rides. In Los Angeles, his friends at Black and White Car Rental hook him up when he’s in town. “Whenever I come into L.A., there’s always something waiting for me. It’s a lot of fun. For example, my brother right now is driving an Aston Martin. I got to drive the R8 a little while. So we get to test a bunch of different cars. A lot of cars.”

Car he learned to drive in

Jonas grew up in Wycoff, New Jersey, where he learned to drive in his mom’s mid-1990s Toyota Camry and got his license at 17. “It was silverish-blue and a year later everybody had that car. It was very funny. It was my high school car. Loved it, it was a great car. My next car ended up being a van and trailer — a giant 16-passenger van with a trailer attached because that was the way we got around the country and that’s the car I drove.”

They drove to gigs around the country. “I drove it all over the place. My dad would drive a lot and couple of band mates and I would drive. Then when it was sitting in our driveway, instead of taking my mom’s car, I would just take that car.”

Jonas says it wasn’t difficult to go from driving the Camry to the van. “It was just a different kind of accelerator and brake and different things like that. It was interesting though to say the least,” he says. “It’s been nice I’ve been able to drive a bunch of different cars because it’s allowed you to feel different vehicles and different makes and models and you pick the things you love.”

By the time Jonas turned 18, things really started to shift as the brothers’ careers took off and they moved to Los Angeles. In a short period of time, the Jonas Brothers would go on to become known worldwide, top the pop charts, sell more than 8 million albums and sing to stadiums packed with 50,000 fans.

First car bought

The first car Jonas bought was a 2007 Jeep Commander, but he sold it last year because it sat in the driveway. “It was amazing. It only had 4,000 miles on it. I was always on the road, we were always on tour and I was always in another country or filming a movie. I still don’t get to drive all that often, but I enjoy it.”

Favorite road trip

One particular trip driving I-95 to Boston in the van back in the early days of the Jonas Brothers is Jonas’ favorite memory. “It was just really nice, each one of us taking shifts and we had a great time driving up,” he says. “Sometimes it can be a long drive because the 95 can have a lot of traffic on it and it would end up being a six- or seven-hour ride instead of the usual three and a half to four. And it was long. It was definitely fun – the guys around us, my brothers, we have a great time together.”

Much of what made it a memorable trip was their interaction in the van. “It was right before everything changed, before we got our first bus and all that stuff and we were doing it all by ourselves. And we were having fun doing it,” he says. “It was the attitude with the guys and everybody in the car. Things could very easily become negative and they were not, they were very positive the whole time. I think what’s really nice about the people around us is because we make fun moments out of anything and everything. So we were sitting in traffic and we were just joking around, laughing, singing songs that were on the radio and just having a good time.”

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